How to Combat Anti-Semitism
In the early 2000s, I met with fellow Bush White House aides Elliott Abrams and Jay Lefkowitz in the latter's West Wing office to discuss the problem of anti-Semitism in the United States. Anti-Semitism at the time was not as severe as it is today, but the number of anti-Semitic incidents had been rising; more than 1,000 occurred in the year 2000. In the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Jewish communal organizations had also begun hardening their infrastructures to protect themselves and their members against anti-Semitic terrorism.
During the meeting, we discussed several possible government actions: creating a Department of Justice task force to look into the issue in greater depth, directing the Department of Education to promote curricula to combat anti-Semitism, and having the president or other senior officials speak out more frequently and forcefully against anti-Semitism.
At the end of the meeting, Abrams posed the perennial question for small-government conservatives: Should federal officials really get more involved in the issue? Although Bush's departments of State and Education did take important steps in this area, Abrams didn't see anything at the time that would warrant a White House-led initiative on the topic; if someone was attacked or a synagogue was defaced, local law enforcement would handle it.
So while the rise in domestic anti-Semitism was worrisome, Lefkowitz and I agreed that the problem did not warrant a major presidential initiative or additional significant policy actions from the federal government. We were all comfortable with the decision at that time.
THE PROBLEM WORSENS
I am reminded of this episode for a reason: The Biden administration recently released a 60-page report announcing interagency measures to combat anti-Semitism, a problem that has worsened considerably since my days in the Bush White House. Since the early 2000s, particularly in the last three to five years, we have seen disturbing evidence that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in the United States than it has been in many decades.
FBI director Christopher Wray noted in 2022 that Jews, who make up 2.4% of the American population, are the victims of an astonishing 63% of religiously motivated hate crimes. The statistics are worrisome, and the incidents themselves have been horrifying. In 2018, an anti-immigration white nationalist murdered 11 Jews attending Sabbath prayers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In Poway, California, on the six-month anniversary of the Pittsburgh murders, another white nationalist attacked a synagogue, killing one person and injuring three. In 2019, Black Hebrew separatists murdered three people at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey. And in 2022, an Islamist terrorist attacked a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, holding four Jews hostage for most of a day until they escaped and the attacker was killed by law enforcement. In addition to the attacks we know about, there have also been multiple planned anti-Semitic attacks foiled by law enforcement before they reached the operational phase.
Then there are the attacks that fall more into the realm of street crime but nonetheless contribute to a sense of fear within the Jewish community. On the streets of Brooklyn, the beating of men in Hasidic garb is a regular occurrence. The New York Police Department reported a 409% increase in hate crimes against Jews between February 2021 and February 2022. The department also recorded 263 total anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2022, more than double the 121 anti-Jewish incidents in 2020. These statistics and incidents contribute to a general sense that anti-Semitism is far more prevalent in 2023 than it was in 2000 or even 1980.
The level of anti-Semitism in America has changed. It has certainly not increased to the point where Jews should flee the country, and perhaps not even to the extent that the government must intervene. But this development is significant enough that we must ask anew the question Abrams raised almost two decades ago: Should the federal government get involved in the issue of domestic anti-Semitism? And if so, how?
ANTI-SEMITISM IN AMERICA
When looking into this question, one should recognize that, as welcoming as America has been to the Jews, it also has a long history of anti-Semitism. In the 17th century, colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to kick the Jews out of what was then New Amsterdam, only to be thwarted by his bosses back in the Old World. During the Civil War, General Ulysses Grant issued the infamous General Order No. 11, banning Jews "as a class" from his military district — a region that included Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi — for fear of their being war profiteers. Abraham Lincoln overturned the order, and Grant later became a friend to the Jewish community. But the episode illustrates the prevailing attitude toward Jews at the time.
Lincoln's repeal of Grant's order was hardly the end of anti-Semitism in America. In 1915, a Jewish man named Leo Frank, who was falsely accused of murdering a Christian child, was lynched by a mob in Georgia. In the 1920s, Harvard imposed quotas on the number of Jewish students it admitted; other Ivy League colleges soon followed suit. The industrialist Henry Ford owned an openly anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which regularly shared anti-Semitic screeds with its 900,000 readers. And in the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin enthralled his 30 million listeners with his anti-Semitic radio rants. Beatings of Jews on the street by Coughlin followers were not uncommon at the time.
Some believe that anti-Semitism in America disappeared after World War II. Matters certainly improved for American Jews in the years after the Holocaust: There was a greater sympathy for the Jewish plight, as well as a wider sense that anti-Semitism could get out of control. But anti-Semitism itself did not go away. Mel Brooks recalls in his memoir All About Me! that he and his partner, Carl Reiner, were reluctant to make a recording of their favorite party skit, the "Two Thousand Year Old Man," because they were "afraid some of the pieces might be offensive to Jews and Catholics and provide some stimulus for anti-Semitism." Brooks and Reiner's fears may have been unwarranted, but they are nonetheless revealing.
The pair eventually released their skit as a record in 1961, and it was a huge hit. Cary Grant played the record of their shtick before the Queen of England, who greatly enjoyed it, prompting Reiner to crack: "The biggest shiksa in the world loved our record. We're in!"
For the next 50 years, the story of Jews in America was largely one of diminishing anti-Semitism and growing integration. Jews achieved astounding success in the cultural, political, academic, and economic arenas. By 2014, Judaism was the most favorably viewed religion in America, according to public-opinion surveys. And yet here, amid those increasingly positive sentiments, lay the seeds for the developments that have led to the recent increases in anti-Semitism and the attendant rise in fear within the Jewish community.
Social media has been one crucial driver of the change. Nasty thoughts that people once kept to themselves now appear on Twitter and other platforms for the world to see. By 2016, two years after the survey showing Jews to be the most favorably viewed religious group, another report showed that the presidential election that year helped generate 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets. Eight hundred journalists received these messages, and 83% of them were sent to just 10 Jewish reporters. Social media had given anti-Semitism a new way to engage in unpleasant behavior. It also led, in some degree, to the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism.
But the problem was not confined to the digital world. A 2021 study of colleges found that more than six out of 10 Jewish students reported feeling unsafe on campus, with one in six fearing physical attacks. Worse still, another 2021 report found that more highly educated Americans are more, not less, likely to be anti-Semitic than less educated ones, calling into question the long-standing theory that anti-Semitism could be mitigated with more education. The link between anti-Semitism and college students raises fears of this hostility becoming even more mainstream: Institutions of higher education, after all, are where we train the next generation of leaders.
Campus anti-Semitism has often stemmed from anti-Israel groups, but the 2020s have witnessed the development of four primary sources of anti-Semitism in the United States: white-supremacist or -nationalist rhetoric, Islamist anti-Israel activism, urban street harassment, and left-wing anti-Semitism that is grounded in an anti-Israel animus but also engages in unnerving talk about billionaires and bankers. The emergence of these four sources of anti-Semitism has unfortunately not led to a unified focus on efforts to combat anti-Jewish hatred; instead, critics on the right call it out on the left while critics on the left call it out on the right. Few are willing to address the anti-Semitism in their own backyards.
THE COSTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM
Beyond the basic problem of keeping the citizenry safe, there lies a deeper challenge implicit in the rise of anti-Semitism — one that might justify a stronger policy approach.
Anti-Semitism has a history of harming nations that engage in it. This is in large part because anti-Semitism is a symptom that usually reveals deeper diseases — namely, rising distrust among the citizenry and the fraying of societal bonds.
Intense anti-Semitism can also propel the outmigration of Jews and other dynamic minorities, enervating the societies in question. After being effectively expelled from Spain in 1492, for instance, many of the exiled Jews immigrated to the Ottoman Empire and lent their talents to Ottoman war efforts. Other Europeans criticized the Spanish for weakening the continent in the face of the Ottoman threat. In 1571, diplomat Giovanni Soranzo cited the Spanish example in arguing against expelling the Jews from Venice. "Do you know what it may cost you in years to come?" he asked. "Who gave the Turk his strength, and where else would he have found the skilled craftsmen to make the cannon, bar, shot, swords, shields and bucklers...if not among the Jews expelled by the Kings of Spain?"
Even without official expulsions, many countries put themselves at a disadvantage by mistreating their Jewish populations. In Russia, some 250 pogroms occurred between 1903 and 1906 under the government of Czar Nicholas II, leading to a mass emigration of Jews from the country. Whether Nicholas himself encouraged the pogroms to bolster his rule is contested by historians, but his government certainly didn't do much to stop them. The violent incidents likely exacerbated his domestic problems: Russia experienced an unsuccessful revolution in 1905, followed by the 1917 revolution that ended the czar's reign — as well as his life.
This tumult had a deleterious impact not just on Russia, but on the world at large. Communist regimes, including the Soviet Union and nations enabled by it, murdered tens of millions of people throughout the 20th century. The upheavals in Russia following the Jewish exodus continue to have implications in our own century, as Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin remains influenced by his Soviet predecessors in pursuing his revanchist territorial ambitions.
Another example of this phenomenon occurred in Arab nations, which expelled nearly all of their Jews in the aftermath of Israel becoming a state in 1948. Nearly a million Jews were kicked out of Arab lands, where they had resided for more than two millennia. The expulsion was traumatic for the displaced Jews, but it also had a detrimental impact on Arab society. Nations like Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco lost the economic vitality of the evicted Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs. In addition, the removal of Jews from Arab nations led to a closure of those societies, making them less open to the West, to modernization, and to advanced economic ideas. This resulted in less freedom for their citizens and ongoing stagnation in the Arab world.
Imperial Spain, czarist Russia, and the Arab world may seem like remote examples without much relevance to contemporary America. But this phenomenon has also emerged in modern Western nations with the same effect. In 1970s Canada, for example, the rise of the anti-Semitic Quebecois in Francophone Montreal led over 10,000 Jews to depart for Anglophone Toronto. During the preceding decades, Montreal had been the leading city of Canada from both an economic and population perspective. Since then, Montreal has ceded that title to Toronto, in large part due to the exodus of talent and capital following the rise of the Quebecois in the city.
Anti-Semitism in the United States hasn't yet driven Jews to emigrate from the country, but it does appear to be motivating internal migration. Future surveys of American Jews will likely reveal a decline in the number of Jews in New York and an increase in both Florida and Texas. New York's lackluster response to routine anti-Semitic street crimes is sure to be one factor in that demographic shift.
TAKING THE PROBLEM SERIOUSLY
Of course, the United States and its Jews have a huge advantage over the countries described above. In most cases of Jewish oppression across the world and throughout human history, the government was an active instigator of anti-Semitism and the policies that drove Jews away. In the United States, by contrast, we are fortunate to have a government that is seeking to help protect its Jews and combat anti-Semitism.
Which brings us to Biden's comprehensive national strategy. The fact that the president of the United States and his administration put so much time and effort into developing and announcing a plan to combat anti-Semitism is itself worthy of commendation. The bully pulpit is one of the president's primary tools, and it is noteworthy that Biden chose to use his for this purpose. We can hope that the presidential condemnation of anti-Semitism itself has an impact — making clear that anti-Jewish hatred is unacceptable and has no place in American society.
That said, from a policy standpoint, Biden's comprehensive plan is a mixed bag. It has four pillars: increasing awareness and understanding of anti-Semitism, improving safety and security for Jewish communities, reversing the normalization of anti-Semitism and countering anti-Semitic discrimination, and building "cross-community" solidarity and collective action to counter hate. All of these are worthy goals. Yet the plan has its weak points as well. It is somewhat soft on anti-Semitism coming from the anti-Israel left; the administration shocked many in the Jewish community by noting that it consulted with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with a notorious anti-Semitic history. Also, it failed to take a clear stance on the important question of defining anti-Semitism. The Biden strategy is thus an important but incomplete step for the federal government's efforts to tackle anti-Semitism; it is far from the end of the policy discussion on the topic.
Before the recent Biden actions, there have been numerous federal initiatives to address anti-Semitism. During George W. Bush's administration, Congress passed, and the president signed, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This act created a special envoy to combat anti-Semitism abroad, a position that presidents of both parties have filled with impressive and dedicated professionals ever since. Bush's Department of Education also issued the first guidance under Title VI protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. In 2006, the Civil Rights Commission issued an important report on campus anti-Semitism that highlighted the problem. Unfortunately, nothing was done to address it, and matters have worsened considerably since then as mentioned above.
Federal efforts to fight anti-Semitism have continued through the Trump and now the Biden administrations. In 2019, the Trump administration held a Summit on Combatting Anti-Semitism that highlighted activities taking place across executive agencies. In March of 2022, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution denouncing anti-Semitism, after which then-majority leader Steny Hoyer issued a strong statement: "This resolution makes clear that the House rejects anti-Semitism forcefully and completely. We stand determinedly against hatred and violence targeting our fellow Americans who are Jewish and those directed at Jewish communities around the world." Both the House and the Senate now have bipartisan task forces on combatting anti-Semitism, which collaborate with other elements of the U.S. government in tackling the problem. This list of measures is by no means comprehensive, but it indicates that the U.S. government continues to be open to finding ways to fight rising anti-Semitism.
This openness presents an opportunity. The recent increase in anti-Semitism has the potential to impose grave costs on American society, and the government has demonstrated an interest in addressing it. Even those who favor limited government would be wise to consider what additional policies could address the problem responsibly. It is also worth considering what additional ideas limited-government advocates can bring to the discussion.
POTENTIAL POLICY STEPS
If the government is going to take further steps to combat anti-Semitism, a helpful place to begin would be to establish an official definition of the term. The organized Jewish community has put substantial effort into such work. The result, which is the standard definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), reads as follows:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
This definition has already been widely adopted, including by 39 countries and more than 450 provinces and cities. Yet the Biden plan acknowledges without fully embracing the IHRA definition. Adoption of the proper anti-Semitism definition has real world implications. Just to take one example, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is tasked with combatting anti-Semitism at educational institutions, but it has rarely brought forward a case on the issue. This is not due to an absence of anti-Semitic incidents but because OCR lacks a definition of the term. Former OCR official Kenneth Marcus put it this way in 2017: "OCR has no definition of anti-Semitism. Absent a definition, the office is stymied by anti-Semitism cases and is failing in its mission to protect Jewish students."
In 2019, the Trump administration issued an executive order mandating that the U.S. government and all of its executive agencies adopt the IHRA statement as the official definition of anti-Semitism. Having the entire U.S. government accept this definition for the purposes of addressing domestic anti-Semitism was a strong first step in enabling agencies to identify and confront the problem. The Biden plan failed to do this, instead acknowledging the IHRA statement but also noting the existence of another weaker definition — the so-called Nexus Document — that largely overlooks anti-Israel critiques that can be of an anti-Semitic nature. This dodge reveals internal disagreement within the administration about moving forward with a clear and actionable definition of anti-Semitism. On the plus side, Biden's OCR did issue a Dear Colleague letter to remind schools of the rights of Jewish students and their obligation to protect them. The letter is a helpful step, but it is not a substitute for a regulation codifying those obligations under the IHRA definition.
Another step government officials — especially at the state and local levels — should consider taking is strengthening their approach to maintaining law and order. In a 2022 talk on the subject, Commentary editor John Podhoretz characterized anti-Semitism as a canary in the coal mine, warning society of problems before they manifest in even larger ways. The rise in street crime related to anti-Semitism, which began in 2013 with the so-called "knockout game" attacks by New York youths against Jews wearing religious garb, illustrates his point. The trend continued through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp increase in attacks against Jews between 2017 and 2018. Two years later, the rest of society witnessed a significant, widespread increase in violent crime.
One reason for the increase in both anti-Semitic attacks and violent crime in general has to do with the decarceration movement. If police are discouraged from making arrests, prosecutors are deterred from pursuing cases, and judges are dissuaded from jailing offenders, a sense of lawlessness and an increase in crime are likely to follow. This is exactly what has happened in recent years, with murder rates spiking by about 30% in 2020 alone.
Jewish victims were the first to suffer from this new, lamentable approach to law enforcement, but the rest of the country encountered it as well a few years later. To address the problem of anti-Semitic street attacks, Jews — and groups that purport to represent the interests of Jews — should push for stricter law-and-order policies to protect themselves and their constituents. The benefits of this approach to law enforcement would go beyond just the Jewish community.
Another widely discussed measure is the hardening of Jewish institutional buildings. Jewish synagogues, schools, and community centers are now regularly protected by concrete barriers, locked doors, and armed guards. However, ill-considered laws making it illegal to carry guns in places of worship — New York's ban being the most prominent — could get in the way of these self-protection efforts. A shooter already bent on killing Jews will not pay much attention to such laws, but they hamper the ability of synagogues to protect themselves with trained congregants who, having the approval of the synagogue leadership, carry weapons in shul. Conservatives should oppose these restrictions, or at least push for exceptions that allow sanctioned carrying by trained individuals who have congregational buy-in to bring their weapons into synagogues for communal protection.
Beyond the efforts of individual congregations, there are also umbrella organizations like the Community Security Service, a Jewish organization that provides training for enhanced security in locations where Jews gather. The U.S. government issues homeland-security grants to these organizations to help Jewish communal locations hire security, bolster their defenses, or provide training for synagogue personnel. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker had undergone this kind of training before the synagogue hostage incident in Colleyville, and credited it with helping him and his three congregants escape unharmed.
Such grants are issued through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) administered by the Department of Homeland Security, and the Biden plan calls for technical assistance aiding applicants for such grants. Elan Carr, a former State Department special envoy for anti-Semitism, has pushed to streamline the process for NSGP applications, which is a good idea. But the hardening of schools and other community buildings, as necessary as it is, brings with it disadvantages as well as advantages.
First, it does nothing to address the hateful ideology of anti-Semitism; it only makes it harder for those who harbor hatred against Jews to act on their impulses.
Second, bolstering physical infrastructure may contribute to a greater sense of separation between Jews and non-Jews. As Dara Horn writes in her book People Love Dead Jews, "when I took my children to an interfaith Thanksgiving service at a church down the street from our synagogue, one of them asked me why no one was guarding the door." If Jewish children notice the difference in security arrangements, non-Jews will as well, potentially contributing to a troubling sense of Jews as "others" who must be protected from the rest of society by restrictive barriers.
Finally, we should be wary of this hardening becoming a crutch. Because bolstering Jewish institutions protects Jews from violence but not anti-Semitism itself, the Jewish community could look at its physical infrastructure and feel as if the problem is solved. In truth, while such fortification is unfortunately needed, the problem will only be solved when such measures are no longer necessary.
ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES
Defining anti-Semitism, reasserting law and order, and giving Jewish institutions the resources and training to protect themselves will help reduce anti-Semitic attacks, but these measures will not diminish the underlying anti-Semitic sentiments that cause them.
The Biden plan relies heavily on existing government-enabled diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — now apparently called DEIA with the "A" standing for accessibility — to address root causes and promote anti-hate education. This is a worrisome development given that some DEI offices are more likely to house anti-Semitism than to combat it. A Heritage Foundation study of the social-media patterns of 800 campus DEI officers found that they tended to reflect a level of hostility toward Israel that went far beyond policy disagreement and often descended into anti-Semitism. One DEI officer who led a University of Maryland anti-Semitism task force accused Israel of an "ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine." Establishing organizations along similar lines and expecting them to combat anti-Semitism will only worsen matters. Thus, limited-government advocates who want to reduce anti-Semitism via public policy should be wary of DEI or DEIA initiatives.
Given that the State Department envoy for anti-Semitism is not tasked with addressing anti-Semitism at home, one potential step policymakers could take is creating a position within the U.S. government to focus on the issue domestically. Former envoy Carr proposes either authorizing a role for a special envoy within the White House Domestic Policy Council or expanding the existing envoy's charge to covering domestic as well as international anti-Semitism.
If the U.S. government is going to expend significant resources to address anti-Semitism, it makes sense to have someone in government monitoring the various offices dedicated to this purpose and attempting to establish some kind of coordination among them. But putting such a position within the White House's purview means it will be subject to the political and policy whims of each successive administration. Perhaps a better idea would be to establish the position within the Justice Department and make it a career job for a former law-enforcement official that would continue regardless of the winner of our quadrennial presidential elections.
The person appointed to this role should consider expanding early intervention programs. We now have a list of indicators that can help identify potential anti-Semitic assailants; for example, those inclined to anti-Semitic violence tend to have experienced some kind of trauma within their own communities and are often isolated. Given our knowledge of these indicators, the potential for group-oriented violence can often be identified at some point before the individual harms anyone — in schools or the corrections system, for instance.
The special envoy should also lead a thorough review of areas in which the federal government enables anti-Semitism. As noted above, the American government does not intentionally target Jews, and even tries to combat anti-Semitism. Yet several government-funded programs could be subsidizing anti-Semitism anyway.
Many if not most of these funds are given to anti-Semitic individuals and programs in educational institutions, including anti-Semitic professors, extremist anti-Israel speakers invited to campus, and public universities that form hostile environments for Jewish students. Title VI of the Higher Education Act provides funds to anti-Israel Middle East Studies programs, academic departments that have issued extremist anti-Israel statements, and public institutions that pay membership dues to the virulently anti-Israel Middle Eastern Studies Association. At the K-12 level, federal funds may go to public schools that assign textbooks containing anti-Semitic materials, encourage anti-Jewish attitudes through ethnic studies or anti-Israel programs, or pay for anti-Semitic critical-race-theory training.
Jason Bedrick, an education policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, has called for a congressional review of government funding for these types of programs, which is a good idea. But such review should take place on the executive-branch side as well, with the Office of Management and Budget taking the lead so that individual agencies are not charged with protecting their own pet projects from scrutiny.
In addition to these education-related expenditures that may have the unintended impact of increasing anti-Semitism, we should also consider cutting off certain types of foreign aid that have a similarly destructive effect. These include contributions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, UNESCO, UNRWA, and any funds that go to programs that subsidize anti-Semitic textbooks or Palestinian terrorism.
Eliminating these programs would not only save taxpayers money and reduce funding to those who purvey anti-Semitism but also send the strongest possible signal that the federal government does not tolerate this animus, whatever its source may be. The Biden administration plan in general refused to confront the problem of anti-Semitism among the anti-Israel left, and it unsurprisingly did not call for any kind of internal scrub of government funding for programs that could promote or harbor anti-Semitism. Yet such a comprehensive rescission would be a useful policy proposal for a future Republican administration to consider.
IN OUR HANDS
While the proposals outlined above are worthy of consideration, there is no single policy that is likely to permanently vanquish anti-Semitism. Instead, we will likely need an approach that uses a mix of strategies.
Yet we must also proceed with caution. Conservatives in the fight against anti-Semitism should harbor an appropriate skepticism of government programs and their tendencies to create unwanted and unintended consequences. Sometimes an organization designed to address the problem ends up exacerbating it — the U.N. Human Rights Council, in which human-rights abusers routinely condemn democratic nations, is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon.
More broadly, our goal should not be to simply fortify communities or prosecute offenders. Although both are necessary, the ultimate aim of these measures should be to encourage societal change. Astute observers have noted that, in the second half of the 20th century, two major changes occurred in civic culture: People no longer engaged in indiscriminate littering, and individuals no longer uttered racist or anti-Semitic comments in polite society. Littering may still be a faux pas, but anti-Semitism has returned; we need to make it unacceptable once again.
Since World War II, the United States has made remarkable improvements in reducing anti-Semitism. The recent revival of the world's oldest hatred is certainly unfortunate, but it can be seen in at least two different ways. It's possible that the post-World War II period was an anomaly, and that the decline of anti-Semitism in those years was only a brief respite from an ancient human proclivity for animosity toward Jews. It is also possible that America is different — a place where, as journalist Bari Weiss has observed, people harboring Old World enmities no longer kill each other but instead join one another for brunch. In this latter scenario, the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism is only a small dip in an otherwise upward-trending trajectory.
The future is not metaphysically pre-determined; it is in our hands. A wise selection of policy tools could make a genuine difference.
